RADIO

The radio, or "wireless," was born in 1895, when Italian physicist and inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) experimented with wireless telegraphy. The following year Marconi transmitted telegraph signals through the air from Italy to England. By 1897 Marconi founded his own company in London, Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd., which began setting up communication lines across the English Channel to France and completed the project in 1898. In 1900 Marconi established the American Marconi Company. He continued making improvements, including sending out signals on different wavelengths so that multiple messages could be transmitted at one time without interfering with each other. The first trans-Atlantic message, from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada, was sent and received in 1901.

At first radio technology was regarded as a novelty and few understood how it could work. But in January 1901 a Marconi wireless station at South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod), received Morse code messages from Europe as well as faint music and voices. That event changed the perception of radio. Before long, Americans had become accustomed to receiving "radiograms"—messages transmitted via the wireless. In 1906 the first radio broadcast of voice and music was made. Ships within a radius of several hundred miles picked up the event, which originated at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, on Christmas Eve. That accomplishment resulted from the invention of another radio pioneer, U.S. engineer Reginald Fessenden (1866–1932), who patented a high-frequency alternator (1901) capable of generating continuous waves rather than intermittent impulses; his invention became the first successful radio transmitter.

In 1910 U.S. inventor Lee De Forest (1873–1961), "the father of radio," broadcast the tenor voice of opera singer Enrico Caruso over the airwaves. In 1916 De Forest transmitted the first radio news broadcast. Within three years of the first commercial radio broadcast, there were more than five hundred radio stations in the United States. National networks were organized, including the National Broadcast Company (NBC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and the Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS). Congress tried to keep pace with the growth of the communications industry by passing the Radio Acts of 1912 and 1927 and setting up the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the airwaves.

During the trying times of the Great Depression (1929–1939), President Franklin Roosevelt (1933–1945) spoke directly to the U.S. public using the new medium which broadcast his "fireside chats" from the White House. By the end of the decade radio was woven into the fabric of everyday American life. People across the country, in cities, suburbs, and on farms, tuned in for news and entertainment; they listened to broadcasts of baseball games and other sporting events as well as comedy and variety shows, dramas, and live music programs. Between the 1920s and the 1950s gathering around the radio in the evenings was as common to Americans as watching television is today. Networks offered advertisers national audiences and corporate America eagerly seized the opportunity to speak directly to people in their own homes. The advent of television in the 1950s and its growing popularity over the next two decades changed the role of radio in American life. Having lost their audience to TV, radio programmers seized rock music as a way to reach a wide, albeit a very young, audience. Many argue that the rise of the musical genre kept radio alive. In the decades since, radio programming became increasingly music-oriented; talk and news programming were also popular.